What follows is an abridged version of the third chapter--"The Art of Pitching"--from Guy Kawasaki's new book The Art of the Start (Portfolio, $26.95).

Forget "I think, therefore I am." For entrepreneurs, the salient phrase is "I pitch, therefore I am." Pitching isn't only useful for raising money--it's an essential tool for reaching agreement on any subject. Agreement can yield many outcomes: management buy-in for developing a product or service, closing a sale, securing a partnership, recruiting an employee or securing an investment.

I've long been an evangelist for better pitching because I suffer from a medical condition called tinnitus. This involves a constant ringing in my right ear. I've been to many specialists, and the bottom line is that no one knows what causes it--much less how to cure it. I've been told to reduce my intake of salt (fat chance for a Japanese-American who loves miso soup and sushi); consume less chocolate, wine and cheese (fat chance for an American-Japanese living in California); and worry less and sleep more (fat chance for a CEO of a tech company in Silicon Valley). I have another explanation for my medical mystery: The ringing is caused by listening to thousands of lousy pitches.

The gist of pitching is to get off to a fast start, explain the relevance of what you do, stay at a high level, listen to audience reaction and then pitch over and over again until you get it right. Here are some tips:

Explain yourself in the first minute.

I've never sat through a pitch and thought, "I wish this speaker had spent the first 15 minutes explaining his life story." While you're busy warming them up, your listeners inevitably are wondering, "What does his organization do?"

This information is the anchor, foundation or beachhead--whatever metaphor you want to use--that your audience needs for the pitch to go well. Do everyone a favor: Answer that question in the first minute. Once the audience has learned what you do, they can listen to everything else with a more focused perspective and cut you the slack to indulge in a few digressions.

Answer the little man.

My colleague Bill Joos told me that when he started his career at IBM, the company trained him to imagine there was a little man sitting on his shoulder during presentations. Every time Bill said something, the little man would whisper "So what?" to him. Every entrepreneur should carry this little man on his shoulder and listen to him. Remember: The significance of what you're saying is not always self-evident, let alone shocking and awe-inspiring.

Know your audience.

Novice entrepreneurs believe that the foundation of a great pitch is the ability to spontaneously generate bull secretion (BS). They're wrong. The foundation of a great pitch is the research you do before the meeting starts. First, learn what's important to your audience. Second, visit the organization's Web site, use Google searches, read reports and talk to your industry contacts to gather core information about the audience. Third, brainstorm with your team to find connections, hooks and angles to make the pitch powerful and meaningful. The possibilities are many, but figuring them out while you're in front of the audience is difficult to do. The key is to conduct this research in advance when you're under little pressure.

Observe the 10/20/30 rule.

I've never heard a pitch that was too short. A pitch can't be too short because a good one will motivate listeners to ask questions that extend it. Here is a good guideline for the content, length and font of a good pitch: ten slides, 20 minutes, 30-point-font text. Use slides to lead, not read. They should paraphrase and enhance what's coming out of your mouth. Because people can red faster than you talk, if you put too much detail on the slide, the audience will read ahead of you and not listen to what you're saying.

Set the stage.

If there's no projector when you show up for a meeting, it's your fault. If your laptop and the projector don't work together, it's your fault. If the bulb blows out in the middle of your pitch, it's your fault. If you start slowly, seem disorganized and look disheveled, it's your fault.

It's almost impossible to recover from a bad start, so get there early and set the stage. Bring your own projector. Bring two laptops loaded up with your presentation. Bring a copy of your presentation on one of those USB-based flash memory products. Bring printouts of your presentation in case all hell breaks loose and nothing works.

Start by asking how much time you have, and by asking what are the three most important things your audience wants you to communicate. If you set the stage so that everyone has the same expectations, you're way ahead of the game.

Let one person do the talking.

Entrepreneurs have it stuck in their heads that investors, customers and partners want to work with teams, and teams show--guess what?--teamwork. Using this line of reasoning, they believe that four or five people from their organization should attend the meeting, and they should each have a role in the pitch because it shows how well the team works.

This logic is terrific for a school play: Every kid gets a talking role. A pitch, however, is not a school play. In a pitch, the CEO should do 80% of the talking. The rest of the team (and there should be no more than two others) can present the one or two slides pertaining to their specific area of expertise. They can also provide detailed answers if any questions arise. But if the CEO can't handle most of the pitch himself, he should practice until he can. Or you should get a new CEO.

Catalyze fantasy.

Every--literally every--entrepreneur shows up at our VC firm, Garage Technology Ventures, with a pitch that has three or four slides that "prove" the size of his market. Usually the slides contain a quote from a well-known consulting firm such as Gartner, IDG or the Yankee Group stating unequivocally that the size of the "shrimp-farming software market will be $50 billion" within the next four years.

The funny thing about these slides is that every market is going to be at least $50 billion; the forecast is four to five years in the future, a time horizon short enough to make the forecast believable but long enough so that it is not provable; and no one in the room, not even the entrepreneur, believes the numbers or thinks they are particularly relevant.

There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to start with the $50 billion number and peel away the layers of the onion until you arrive at the realistic "total addressable market" (TAM). The TAM is the true size of the potential market you can go after, not the totality of every nickel that's spent in something related to your product or service.

The second solution is bolder: Forget the market research and catalyze fantasy. You do this by providing a product or service that is so obviously needed that members of your audience can do the math in their heads. This method won't work in all cases because some markets are not that obvious, but when it does work it is spectacular.

Get to 1,000 feet and stay there.

I promise that this is the only war analogy in this book. Consider three methods to deliver lethal force: the high-altitude B-1B Lancer bomber, the Navy Seals and the A-10 Warthog close-air-support plane. If pitches were weapons, the majority would be B-1 Lancers or Navy Seals. The B-1 pitch is up in the clouds. It features a lot of hand-waving, cool PowerPoint animations and use of such terms as strategic, partnerships, alliances, first-mover advantage and patented technology. Typically it's delivered by an MBA with a finance or consulting background.

Geeks, propeller heads and engineers deliver the Navy Seal pitch. They explain the subtle nuances of their technology and use a lot of acronyms that only they understand. It's clear that these people know every bit of their technology--and would love to explain it all to you.

The B-1 pitch is too high because listeners want to learn specifically what the business does and why it will succeed. Big words don't accomplish this. The Navy Seal pitch is too low because it focuses on the bits, bytes and nits. But a pitch isn't about microscopic due diligence.

The right analogy for pitching your business is neither the B-1 Lancer (30,000 feet) nor the Navy Seal (0 feet). It's the A-10 Warthog (1,000 feet). Like the plane itself, your pitch doesn't have to be pretty, just effective: above the ground but still tactical. Pitch at the 1,000-foot level. Up there you're not above the clouds where the air is thin, but you're not on the ground with a knife in your teeth, either. Provide enough detail to prove you can deliver and enough aerial view to prove you have a vision.

Shut up, take notes, summarize, regurgitate and follow up.

I once accompanied a startup's chief executive and its chief operating officer on a pitch to a venture capitalist. A few days after the pitch, I met with the venture capitalist alone. When we began to discuss the Management (with a capital M), all he said was, "I noticed that the CEO did a lot of talking, but the COO was sitting there taking notes. The CEO didn't write down a thing. I think the COO is a quality guy."

The visible act of taking notes says, "I think you're smart; you're saying something worth writing down; I'm willing and anxious to learn; I'm conscientious." Also, at the end of the meeting, summarize what you heard and play it back in order to make sure you got the correct information. You can make an even greater impression by also following through, within a day, on all the promises you made during the pitch--for example, providing additional information.

Rewrite from scratch.

This is a difficult recommendation for people to accept, but first, allow me to digress briefly and tell you about cars in the Philippines. Because of import duties, restrictions on trade and the low cost of labor, fixing cars there is a much more attractive proposition than buying new ones. Thus, many cars are rebuilt and patched with parts cannibalized from other vehicles, as well as with handmade components. For example, it's common to see a Jeep with a Chevrolet engine.

Unfortunately, after a while, many pitches start looking like these cars. They started as one model, but their owners kept editing and patching them after each meeting in response to the most recent questions and objections. This process goes on for weeks--with each meeting producing more edits, fixes and patches--until it's difficult to recognize the pitch at all, which by this point touches upon every subject but obfuscates the overall message.

Here's my recommendation: After ten or so pitches, throw away your presentation. Start with a clean slate and write the text from scratch. Let this "version 2.0" reflect the gestalt of what you've learned to date instead of being a patchwork quilt.

Pitch constantly.

Familiarity breeds content. It's when you are totally familiar and comfortable with your pitch that you'll be able to give it most effectively. There are no shortcuts to achieving familiarity--you simply have to pitch a lot of times.

Twenty-five times is what it takes for most people to reach this point. All these pitches don't have to be to your intended audiences--your co-founders, employees, relatives, friends and even your dog are fine auditors.

Forget the theory of "rising to the occasion" when you actually give the pitch. If you're lousy in practice, you'll be lousy in the pitch, so get going--because if there's anything worse than getting tinnitus, it's causing it.

Guy Kawasaki is managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm for technology firms. He also writes the "Art of the Start" column for Forbes.com, and his previous books include Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream and The Macintosh Way. His latest book, The Art of the Start, goes on sale Sept. 13.

More From Forbes

Q&A: Guy Kawasaki 09.10.04 The Art of the Start author on getting entrepreneurs out of the starting gate.

Two for Our Time 09.20.04 Rich Karlgaard discusses Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start and Andy Kessler's Running Money.

Stock quotes are delayed at least 15 minutes for Nasdaq, at least 20 minutes for NYSE/AMEX.
U.S. indexes are delayed at least 15 minutes with the exception of Nasdaq, Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 which are 2 minutes delayed.